Cameron Brewer: Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister on the harsher penalties for misleading pricing

The Government says it won't punish genuine mistakes with its planned new crackdown on misleading pricing. 

A bill's been introduced to Parliament that would increase the maximum penalty for misleading prices from $600 thousand to $5 million. 

The Commerce Commission estimates such prices are costing New Zealanders tens-of-millions-of-dollars a year.  

Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer told Mike Hosking there's always room for error. 

But he says there's also some businesses who treat the current penalty for misleading pricing as the cost of doing business. 

LISTEN ABOVE 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Back to the supermarkets. We've got the Fair Trading Amendment
Bill that will lift fines from six hundred thousand dollars
to five million, or three times the value of any
commercial gain. So once again we're cracking down on the
so called deceptive pricing at supermarkets. Anyway, Cameron Brewer isn't chargeable.
This is the Commers and Consumer Affairs Minister and is
with us morning.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Good morning, Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
What's your observation of these supermarkets and what they're doing
around prices? Is it optics or is it reality?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well, what we know we are doing is fixing up
the Fair Trading Act and making sure that we're lifting
penalties which is long overdue for misleading pricing and conduct.
The penalty regime for unfair trading and breaches hasn't changed.
The penalties haven't changed since twenty fourteen. So we're taking

(00:47):
the hammer to it. We've introduced the Fair Trading Bill
and it's going to go through a select committee process
and we're all about giving consumers a fairer go.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, but in taking the hammer to it, taking the
hammer to what you thinks driving it? Are they ripping
us off?

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Oh? Well, look there's all sorts of cases that are
before the courts or through the media, and I don't
want to comment on the individual ones. There's plenty of anecdotes,
but there's also plenty of examples where prices on the
shelf mismatch what you pay what you pay at the till,
and also promises that have been made in advertising that

(01:26):
aren't delivered when that product is purchased.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Is it possible that the supermarket industry is so complex
because they deal with literally thousands of products therefore tens
of thousands of prices, that occasionally a mistake's going to
be made, it's not actually a scandal.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
And that's right when the Commerce Commission investigate these and
then for those that go to get taken through the
Upland District Court or wherever it's all proportionate, it's fully investigated.
So if there's a genuine mistake and it hasn't been
repeated for many, many, many years, then that has taken
to account. The breaches or penalties will reflect that. We

(02:03):
know there's always room for error, but we also know
there's always there's always room too where people where some
entity sometime look at the cost of the breach and
at the moment. There's a maximum penalty of six hundred thousand,
and some could think that that is the price of
doing business. I'll pay off the breach and I'll take
the risk. So we're just lifting the breach the penalties

(02:27):
to a maximum of five million dollars and that'll be
a big to terror.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
You guys have dawbin this led by Nikola Willis, of course,
who's absolutely convinced the scandal of foot in the banking
industry and the telco industry and of course the supermarket industry.
Is there a set of rules and regulations where you
can tidy this up once and for all.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Do you think, well, we are going through systematically across
our competition settings to give consumers, give kiwis a better deal,
whether it's in electricity and energy, whether it's in groceries
across supermarkets, whether it's in financial services and banking. We
are really looking at those competition settings and making it
as sharp as possible and protecting the consumer as much

(03:05):
as we can.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
All right, I wish you well, Cameron Brewer, our Minister
of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. I mean, am I the
only one who doesn't think there's a scam a foot?
I mean, you know, are there dodgy prices every now
and again, But I mean, we spend so much time
angsting about the stuff in this country for years, we've
gone and if we solved the problem, look at Australia.
I outlined the Australian situation to you the other day.
Both of the major well the three major players in
that part of the world, two of them are in

(03:27):
court at the moment. So you know we want more competition. Well,
they've got more competition. Does competitions solved the problem?

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Though?

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Why are they in court?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to
news Talks. It'd be from six am weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.